Multinational companies do business with people all over the world. A multinational company's customers come from a variety of different countries. These customers read, write, and speak a variety of different languages. In order to satisfy customers from all over the world, multinational companies are interested in delivering, to their customers, content written in the languages that those customers can understand.
For example, a newspaper publisher might have subscribers from many different countries, and subscribers from different countries may speak different languages. The newspaper publisher might be capable of producing editions of a newspaper (or a digital version thereof) in several different languages. Different language editions of a newspaper might actually have different content (i.e., not just merely a translation of the same content from a different language edition) that is estimated to be of interest to those who read various different languages. In order to serve the correct language edition of the newspaper to a particular subscriber, the newspaper publisher wants to know which languages the particular subscriber can read.
For another example, an Internet search engine provider, such as Yahoo! Inc., might provide several portal web pages that contain text entry fields into which users from around the world can submit query terms. Users who submit query terms to the search engine via the text entry fields are interested in seeing search results that are relevant to the submitted query terms. More specifically, such users are interested in seeing search results that are not only relevant to the query terms, but are also written in languages that those users can read and have in mind when entering the particular query terms. Search results may come from locations all over the world, and the documents to which those search results refer may be written in various different languages. Users of a search engine are sure to be disappointed if the majority of the search results that those users receive from that search engine are written in languages that those users do not understand, even if the search results were highly relevant to the query terms that the users submitted.
Unfortunately, the task of estimating the language that is useful for a particular user for a particular case, under many circumstances, not a trivial task. Often, the only information that is known about a particular user is limited to relatively short text that the user has provided. For example, under some circumstances, the only information that an Internet search engine has regarding a user is the relatively short string of query terms that the user has entered into the text entry field of the Internet search engine's portal page. The intended language of the same query may be different depending on the user. For the same query, German documents may be more useful or French documents may be more useful depending on the user's intent.
An Internet search engine or other content-providing entity could conceivably ask its users, expressly, in which languages those users want to get the content service. However, if a user is asked, in a language that the user does not understand, the question about which languages the user speaks, then the user will not be able to answer the question. Asking this question in every possible language is somewhat impractical and lacks finesse. Additionally, unless the content-providing entity wants to ask the entity's users this question repeatedly (which can irritate the users) over multiple interactions with those users, the content-providing entity will need to store the answer to this question, and associate each user's answer with that user, usually by requiring the user to create a registered account with the entity. Some busy users are reluctant to take the time to create a registered account, and other users, fearful of identity theft, are hesitant to provide any personal information to a content-providing entity. Thus, asking users to indicate, expressly, which languages those users are capable of reading is not always a feasible solution.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.